Neil Clarke, at Save the Semiprozine Hugo said in his “We Did It” post:

Our supporters spoke eloquently and with conviction. When the vote was finally held, we won by an overwhelming majority.

That means the Best Semiprozine Hugo will continue to be awarded. With the “Making the Web Eligible” amendment taking effect, eligible works will include not only publications produced as issues, but “the equivalent in other media,” meaning qualifying blogs and websites.

The identical change to the Best Fanzine category definition also was ratified.

Clarke reported this other important development:

A new committee to help redefine the semiprozine and related Hugos was voted into place shortly afterwards. It will be chaired by Chris Barkley.

While waiting for an explanation of what that means, exactly, I hope it will lead to better definitions of commercial and noncommercial fanac in the Hugo categories. Which we’ll need in 2010 — before the committee can even make its first report. Always remember the World Science Fiction Society motto, “Ready! Fire! Aim!”

“With the “Making the Web Eligible” amendment taking effect, eligible works will include not only publications produced as issues, but “the equivalent in other media,” meaning qualifying blogs and websites.”

You and Cheryl Morgan seem to be contradicting each other; she wrote in her comment #7 here that “To qualify as a fanzine the site still have to be non-profit and (at least currently) to have recognizable issues.”

Which would exclude blogs. So which is it? Are blogs eligible as Fanzines, or not? (I’m fine, I think, with them not, as that seems reasonable, what with them not being made of discrete issues, and the writers still being eligible, obviously, for Best Fan Writer; I’d just like a clarification of the facts here, please.)

Over at your PDF issue, you write: “P.S. One other thing bothers me about the soon-to-be-ratified rule change. Why haven’t the knowledgeable fans who proposed it given the category a new name in order to avoid the clumsy anachronism of calling virtually every form of two-dimensional fanac a fanzine, as the rule will effectively do?”

“Best Written Fanac”? But then I think you would have to include blogs for that title to be accurate.

Actually, “Ready! Fire! Aim!” was the motto of the decidedly non-fannish former Mayor Schoemehl of St. Louis, the Mayor who strong-armed the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel (famous in story and song) out from under Archon for the Miss Universe pageant — as I recall, he actually had it in inscribed in a desktop nameplate like President Harry Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here”, in addition to the one which actually had his name.

I don’t remember now if it was from MidAmeriCon, SunCon, or IguanaCon, but an alternative-future fan fiction in a progress report for one of them gave what ought to be the tripartite motto for the WSFS (uninc.), elegant in it’s simplicity, extravagant in its implications:

Chris asked me to be on the committee and I’m considering it. I’ve asked him which fanzine fans are on the committee because I want to make sure traditional fanzines have a strong voice. He said he’d let me know.